SCCM Toolkit Collection Evaluation Viewer CEViewer exe

By this time you must have downloaded SCCM ToolKit(this is new updated SCCM tool kit Microsoft published in new location). The toolkit contains some awesome tools which help SCCM admin to perform day to day activities and troubleshooting with lot of ease. One of the tool which we are going to look into is Collection Evaluation Viewer.

Are you looking for a GUI tool which tells you about collection evaluations happening at your primary site? Why the collections are NOT getting updated? Normally, we need to look at colleval.log and CollEval.box to check whether there is any issue in collection evaluation and there is some backlog in CollEval.box. In this post, I’m going to give a walk through of Collection Evaluation Viewer tool (CEViewer.exe) which is part for SCCM tool kit.

In ConfigMgr with CAS (hierarchy), Collection Evaluation issues are more complex to troubleshoot. The collection evaluation is always done on the Primary site in your hierarchy. When you update the collection from CAS then it will cause more delays in collection update. The collection Evaluation Viewer (CEViewer.exe) can only connect to primary server. Do you know how many types of collection evaluation queues are there in ConfigMgr SCCM 2012 R2? You can get answers to all your questions below.

2. Full Evaluation Tab in CEViewer.exe Lists the detailed information about all full collection evaluations that happened in the past.

Site Code = PRI, Total Run Time of Collection 00:00:50 and Total Collection= 13

It also provides following details the Collection Name, Site ID is Collection ID (So, don’t get confused with Site ID).

It also displays, How much time the collection took to complete the evaluation process. Along with it will give answers to following questions :- How to find out last collection evaluation completion time? How to find out the next collection Evaluation Time? How to find out number of members changes during the collection evaluation for a specific collection ? How to find the last member change time for a collection?

Collection Evaluation Viewer Full Evaluation

3.Incremental Evaluation tab in CEViewer.exe lists the detailed information about all incremental collection evaluations that happened in the past.

This tab provides all the information about Incremental Evaluation of collection along with answers to all the questions about collection.

Site Code = PRI, Total Run Time of Collection 00:00:50 and Total Collection= 13

It provides the Collection Name, Site ID is Collection ID (So, don’t get confused with Site ID).

It also displays, How much time the collection took to complete the evaluation process. Along with it will give answers to following questions :- How to find out last collection evaluation completion time? How to find out the next collection Evaluation Time? How to find out number of members changes during the collection evaluation for a specific collection ? How to find the last member change time for a collection?

Collection Evaluation Incremental Evaluation

4.All Queues tab in CEViewer.exe provides details about all types of collection evaluation queues pending to get processed. In my example, you can see Full Evaluation collection queues. This Summarizes the current collection evaluations for all four queues.

Right hand side you can see list of collections in each section a) Manual Update b) New Collections c) Full Evaluation and d) Incremental Evaluation.

On left hand side : – You can see the Summery of collections –> Collection Numbers (Coll #) and Queue Length (Q. Len) of each collection. Full Evaluation – Coll # = 2 Queue Length = 1.

Running Evaluation :- Started on which collections. How many seconds elapsed. For example you can see “Software Testing” collection.

Collection Evaluation Viewer All Queue Full Eval

5. Manual Queue tab in CEViewer.exe providesManual Collection Evaluation Queues pending to be processed. Lists the detailed information about the current collection evaluation in the manual queue.

Some more details like : Collection Name, Collection ID (Site ID), Estimated Completion Time and Estimated Run Time.

Collection Evaluation Manual Queue

6.New Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provide the list of new collection evaluation queues.

List of collections which are currently in queue to get processed for NEW Collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult see the “Test Collection“.

Collection Evaluation New Queue

7.Full Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides list of collections which are pending for FULL Collection EVALUATION.

List of collections which are currently in queue to get processed for FULL collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult see the “OSD Collection” and “Software Testing“.

Collection Evaluation Viewer FULL EVAL QUEUE

8.Incremental Queue tab in CEViewer.exe provides full list of collections which are pending for Incremental evaluation update.

List of collections which are currently in queue to get processed forIncremental collection evaluation. This also provides Site ID (Collection ID), Estimated Completion Time and Estimated Run Time of new collections. I know it’s difficult see the “All Users and Groups, All User Groups etc…“.

You can click on REFRESH button to get latest update on collection evaluation queues.

Collection Evaluation Viewer Incremental Queue

9. You can click on REFRESH button to get latest update on collection evaluation queues. Also make use of STOP AUTO REFRESH option in .

Anoop is Microsoft MVP and Veeam Vanguard ! He is a Solution Architect on enterprise client management with more than 17 years of experience (calculation done on the year 2018) in IT. He is Blogger, Speaker and Local User Group Community leader. His main focus is on Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012,Current Branch, Intune. He writes about the technologies like SCCM, SCOM, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, RMS, Hyper-V etc...

Once you disable the incremental refresh on a collection , it should no longer show up in the viewer. The colleval.log shows I have 77 collections currently performing incremental evaluations yet this tool continues to show even the old collections that have since been disabled. I have yet to find a supported way to clear the incremental evaluation time in the DB for those collections.

Hi Steve ! – It should automatically reflect in the database once we disable the incremental refresh/update on a collection (no need of any manual intervention). I’ve checked and confirmed the same in SQL DB. But not very sure why this is not getting reflected in the tool. Have you tried close and relaunch the tool ? Regards Anoop

I have installed the viewer on three different SCCM 2012 R2 sites and the viewer behaves the same way on all three. Once you enable incremental update on a collection, it still shows up in the viewer after disabling incremental even though I can see the status change in the collection database table.

I have the same issue, I removed “incremental updates” from ~100 collections a week ago but they still show up under “Incremental Evaluation”. “Last evaluaton time” is of course old, but the totals in the top right is wrong, so I have to manually copy out the data that is still relevant into excel to check total run time 🙂

I am getting an error when connecting to primary servers in any of the sites. The Error says “The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.” All the certificates on the primary server where the tool is installed as well as a laptop were issued by the domain CA and is in the trusted publishers list. How can I find which certificate this tool is trying to use? How can I run the tool without needing a certificate? Thanks,

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Hi, I’m Anoop C Nair. I’m the person behind this website. Thank you for visiting the website and about me page! My website is all about Microsoft technologies. More about ConfigMgr (a.k.a SCCM), Intune, Mobile Device Management and all other technologies which are interesting for me. Read more about me here